After almost
three decades of contemplating Swarovski-encrusted navels on increasing flat
abs, the Mumbai film industry is on a discovery of India and itself. With
budgets of over 30 crore each, four soon to be released movies by premier
directors are exploring the idea of who we are and redefining who the other is.
It is a fundamental question which the bling-bling, glam-sham and disham-disham
tends to avoid. It is also a question which binds an audience when the lights
go dim and the projector rolls: as a nation, who are we? As a people, where are
we going?

The Germans
coined a word for it, zeitgeist, which perhaps Yash Chopra would not care to
pronounce. But at 72, he remains the person who can best capture it. After
being the first to project the diasporic Indian on screen in Lamhe in 1991, he
has returned to his roots in a new movie. Veer Zaara, set in 1986, where
Pakistan, the traditional other, the part that got away, is the lover and the
saviour. In Subhas Ghai’s Kisna, set in 1947, the other is the English woman.
She is not a memsahib, but a mehbooba. In Ketan Mehta’s The Rising, the East
India Englishman is not the evil oppressor of countless cardboard
characterisations, which span the spectrum from Jewel in the Crown to Kranti,
but an honourable friend.

This is Manoj
Kumar’s Desh Ki dharti with a difference: there is culture, not contentious
politics; balle balle, not bombs: no dooriyan (distance), only nazdeekiyan
(closeness).

All four films
are heralding a new hero and heroine. The new hero is fallible and vulnerable,
committed to his dharma, but also not afraid of failure - less of a boy and
more of a man. He even has a grown up name: Veer Pratap Singh in Veer-Zaara and
Mohan Bhargav in Swades. The new heroine is not a babe, but often a bebe,
dressed in traditional Punjabi clothes, often with the stereotypical body type
as well, as in Bride and Prejudice of Gurinder Chadha.